The Forever War – Joe Haldeman

Joe Haldeman’s “The Forever War” could have been the perfect example of regular science fiction (SF). Faraway planets, belligerent aliens and inventions that can be scarcely imagined today make for the perfect heady mix to take the reader into an adventure filled world of the future. Haldeman’s greatest achievement, however, is to marry this standard stock of SF plots, characters and environments with his Vietnam experience to create a work that has Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket or Copolla’s Apocalypse Now rather than anything by Asimov or Clarke as it closest cousins. In this sense, The Forever War can be read as the natural extension of (or a response to) Robert Heinlein’s works (Starship Troopers in particular) and a precursor to Orson Scott Card’s Ender series.

The title seems to allude to some eternal conflict of the scale of Fantastic Four vs. Galactus, with entire worlds, humanity and numerous other alienities at stake (if the earlier example was too abstruse think of the good old good versus evil stuff). The allusion however is to a much more personal conflict. The story ekes out the army career of William Mandella, a reasonably smart but reluctant soldier fighting for a world that, due to the temporal vagaries of relativistic travel (time dilation), he can scarcely recognize let alone decide to live in on his return. The world has been nicely rationed into have and have nots through a mechanical analysis of an individual’s value to humanity. In his own world he soon realizes he is a have not. The army is his only home and combat his sole competency; the forever war is his hope of living and dying in a society that he understands.

Not that our protagonist likes the army; he derides the maniacal focus on orders at the expense of rational thought, he objects on his being treated as a mere pawn that can be moved on a board, he gets sick on the scale of atrocities he commits as a part of his campaigns. In an ultimate panning, Haldeman concludes that more than any number of Mandellas, it is the armed forces who need the forever war to justify their existence. This is no revolt of the individual against the system (like Ender in Ender’s Game) but a judgement on who really benefits from a conflict.

It is also important to add a note on narrative structure of The Forever War. Almost entirely dedicated to Mandella’s point of view it is not a great example of world building. Every time our protagonist has the time and opportunity to look around the world has changed beyond belief, and he never pauses enough to immerse himself in it; the reader consequently shares a similarly disjointed view of the world. The only opportunity Mandella had in the plot to explore the future of humanity in some detail, Haldeman chooses to end the novel. Incomplete and one-dimensional the resulting world does not allow the reader to accept or reject the future; consequently also introducing ambiguity on the validity of the moral processes that led to this world.

innocent: our story & somethings we have learnt

This is a business book; the type I normally keep at a distance because often they regurgitate pithy homilies while pretending to have some secret knowledge that would be spur us and the organization we work for to giddy heights once the book is paid for. And the writing is often so abysmal that Sidney Sheldon and Robert Ludlum would probably split the Nobel Prize between them every year. So when browsing at a bookstore a friend passes on this book with a comment “doesn’t this look cool”, I look at it and by habit almost put it back on the shelf. Yet the name, “innocent”, with a clunky looking half drawn smiley logo intrigued me. So I picked it up again, read through the cover and back, flipped across the pages to see if I can fathom why of all words they chose innocent!

What I learnt instead was that the book is about a smoothie company who sell 100 million pounds worth of smoothies a year. Now, the last number was interesting because it made me feel dumb – for if I was to be asked how much money can a company make out of selling smoothies I would not hazard a guess anywhere close to 100 million pounds. Plus, there were pictures of cows grazing of turf covered vans, smoothie bottles with woolen headgear on and people generally looking goofy and happy.

It so turns out that the book is full of pithy homilies: stick to core values, listen to customers, hire and treat people well, struggle to find a way to yes when all say no. All of it with heavy dollops of social responsibility and ecological concern thrown in. But in a engaging way; in a way that would make you think of selling smoothies also. The book is goofy, irreverent and written with a tone that suggests a friend telling a story in a pub over a beer and not a professor lecturing a class. If anything their approach and suggestions might appear to be totally devoid of any serious content to one mulling over entrepreneurship for there is little discussion on what was their rationale for strategic (in hindsight successful) decisions.

But the lack of seriousness does not imply frivolity. Their approach – try things out, start with small, have fun at work – might sound generic but are probably the only common things to do between differing entrepreneurial ventures. The push of the book is to make decisions first and not stall on them thinking about their correctness; to take the first step and not evaluate jumping headlong to the middle of the pond. And if you think about it, there is nothing really to talk about in depth about starting shop because the decisions would be local to the what shop you start and where. Every entrepreneur’s story will be different.

In short, if you want to read one book about entrepreneurship read this. At worst, being short it won’t waste too much of your time. At best, you might decide to take your first step.

Note 1: I had never heard about innocent before reading this book. Little research on internet shows that they are facing some serious challenges and also that they got into some trouble for not being all that they claimed. Also I have never tasted a drink of theirs (though I will gulp one at the first opportunity).

Note 2: None of the above takes anything away from the book

The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind – James Boyle

The current debate on Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) confuses many supposed experts not to say anything about the layman – a regrettable scenario in this  age where these rights are probably the most important for any information worker. James Boyle’s  ”The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind” seeks to tackle the very specific problem of defining the extent of the qualifier “public” in the term public domain. But he recognizes the tangled nature of the subject and in most of the book (more than 80%) talks about the rationale, implementation and the current challenges in the IPR regime just setting up the stage to tackle his primary subject. While experts might be able to comment on how much of new ground Boyle breaks with this work, for laymen like me it is a succinct introduction to IPR.

Boyle starts with two basic assumptions about the nature of intellectual property. First, that IPRs (and property rights in general) are utilitarian social constructs – their primary purpose being to act as incentives for individuals to develop resources in a way that society as a whole is benefited. These constructs also aims to reduce social friction and transaction costs furthering the benefit to the society. Most importantly this assumption rejects the idea of natural property rights i.e. rights based on first to reach, develop or occupy. Boyle argues that the natural property concept is not so natural once one considers how much of seeing ahead is done standing on the shoulders of others. The second assumption is based around the unique economics of information goods; they are non-exclusive and non-rival. In plain speak, a person having the good does not make anyone else poorer and it is impossible to exclude once initial access is granted. The first ensures that any price extracted for IPR will exceed the marginal cost of production i.e. will be monopolistic and the second feature ensures that any effective enforcement measures will involve control over distribution.

These starting assumptions, on little reflection, turn out to be mutually incompatible. The social utility of IP arises from greater sharing and allowing society to build upon existing ideas. The economics however make it impossible for rights holders to charge a price and use the standard market mechanisms to extract the  price from all users. The current IPR regime strikes a middle ground in trying to compromise between these conflicting assumptions. IPRs provide the creator with the opportunity to extract a monopolistic price (and hence have the incentive for developing ideas in the first place) for a fixed period in return for the idea being available broadly. The compromise is viewed by Boyle as a necessary evil that is allowed under specific conditions. In particular, Boyle lays down two evaluating criteria: a) the innovation though socially productive would not have happened in the normal course under existing market incentives, and b) the monopoly period should be just enough to justify the costs for the creator.

In line with the compromise outlined earlier, IPR itself can be broken down into three subsegments – patents, copyrights and trademarks – each with varying levels of protection in line with existing market incentives to cover costs and the ability to extract price in a non-monopolistic fashion. Patents are for “non-obvious” inventions and probably have the shortest lifetime. This might seem counter-intuitive but there is a significant market incentive for developing new inventions and getting them first to market. As patents were originally conceived they were awarded for working inventions and not ideas. Copyrights were primarily designed for cultural productions i.e. books, music, movies but the content itself is not protected but only the specific expression is. Trademarks are awarded so that there is a reliable market signalling mechanism for brands committed to  innovation and quality of service in the long term.

So why this hoopla on copyright and patents now? The current IPR regime is based upon two assumptions: a) Works/inventions are costly to copy en mass – set up a printing press etc and, b) these offending structures and individuals are centralized i.e. easy to find and punish. These assumptions fail in the world of internet where the marginal cost of creating and distributing a copy is zero, it is difficult to catch the original  perpetrator and impossible to stop any infringement once it has started. As a result of this IPR holders are seeking to maintain status quo by expanding the definition of IPR infringements and aggressively pursuing tougher sentences on any offendents of these enhanced rules. IPR holders argue that greater protection is needed to maintain the incentives in place for innovation to continue. Opponents claim that these enhanced IPR restrictions come very close to infringing rights of an individual (free speech, fair use),  restricting innovation by scaring potential innovators (the original goal) and, creating detrimental effects for the original owners by limiting access. The social cost in the later group’s opinion far exceeds any potential benefit to the society.

Modern technology also adds another layer complexity. With physical technology, the acting machine and the idea driving it were separate. But computer code is not just expression i.e. protected by copyright but also executable which makes it protected by patents. This poses risks to innovation because it can lock up broad ideas rather than specific implementations. In emerging fields such as synthetic biology sharing these traits, there is considerable risk of the essential technology stack (think stuff like TCP/IP) being under patents using this rationale and hence unavailable for public to work with.

The most pressing problem however is that there is no clearing house for IPRs; even if the creator approves of the use there is no way to get it sanctioned and verified. The cost of verification are very high as are the risks of non-compliance. The inputs to the innovation process are suddenly inaccessible because of the lack of a transparent licensing policy. It is this problem that Boyle offers a solution to in this book – the creative commons license. With copyright in place, implying that the author retains the rights to the work, one can create a licence that makes the content free to sharing and reuse with attribution. The idea is that enforcing and creating specific laws for matching individual preferences for control of content is not scalable. However it is scalable to give creators a framework to specify the level of control they want to exercise over their creations.

This however is the grazing the tip of the problem that Boyle lays out earlier. There is an inherent fluidity that is necessary to any IPR regime that he fails to point out; in other words a good regime needs to focus on the process and outcomes rather than ensuring generic applicability. As a first, the burden of proof (of social benefit) be on the organization that lobbies for a new IPR regime. Further, new rights have a probationary period wherein the resulting benefits are tracked and if needed the rule is reversed. In the shifting sands of today’s technology, any attempt to think through a generic solution implies being light years late for the field. The emphasis on process is also important because it is easy for someone to argue about the ills of new technology that merit IPR revisions while keeping mum about the benefits. Hence in the land of IPR we should prefer the Darwinian path of evolution rather than thinking of creating a perfect world from the very beginning.

Collapse – Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond’s Collapse is one of those rare books that argues in a nuanced and fact based fashion, and not emotionally charged rhetoric, the need for us to re-evaluate the way we live today and the values we hold dear. For most of the book Diamond tries to explain why societies as diverse as Easter Island, Anasazi Indians, Norse Greenland and Yucatan Mayas sufferred a sudden and staggering drop in their populations – in other words just collapsed. Yet as he tells the stories of these ancients cultures and their social structures and norms, he never misses an opportunity to point out that much like these societies the modern human society might be undone not by doing what is obviously wrong but what is considered socially right. As if to emphasize that history is not a collection of recondite facts but its study is relevant to solving problems of this day and age, Diamond starts the book in modern day Montana and ends in China outlining the very same factors and actors in play as in the collapses of ancient world.

Diamond admits in the preface that he started out to write a book that warns about the dangers of environmental damage highlighting the societal collapses of the past. Yet, as he studied the past it became clear that environmental degrdation was not the only factor that lead to the destruction of societies. Survival of  societies instead depends on a complex set of factors that can be broadly classified under five heads: environmental/ecological damage, natural climate change, emergence of superior hostile neighbours, loss of essential trade partners and most importantly the societies response to any of the above factors. These factors and especially the last one explains why certain societies have survived in same or similar geography when other societies there have collapsed (Inuits survived in Greenland while Norse didn’t; Tikopians survived on a lonely island in South Pacific while Easter Islanders did not).  Also Diamond’s five point framework puts him squarely away from the environmental deterministic camp – while he agrees that the climate and ecology of region and the inevitable changes due to human action does determine the fate of the resident population in no way are they the only reasons. A lot depends on the society’s ability to recognize it’s problems and take long term corrective actions over short term gains.

The environmental problems that Diamond outlines fall into two broad categories: unrestricted extraction either of non-renewable resources like minerals or slow developing resources like forests and soils, and wastage either in terms of unnecessary consumption of scarce goods or non-consumption of easily available goods.  While it does seem counterintuitive that rational humans would not recognize these problems and take corrective actions, Diamond offers his thesis on why such scenarios are not unimaginable. First, long term degradation trends are difficult to identify and corrective actions are often impossible to justify. Second, the sustainable equilibrium states in geographies is difficult to quantify making it difficult to develop any long term policies. Third, immediate large gain for a few individuals is preferred against small long term losses for a large number of individuals making any corrective policies difficult to implement. Finally, the problem solving processes within societies evolve from prevailing hierarchies and social norms and are fraught with blind spots. Taken together, all of these ensure that a society has potentially has no chance to react before it falls off the proverbial cliff. Yet, no single group or individual can be held responsible for the social collapse for all of the above are difficult problems and results of socially and culturally accepted actions.

However, the most important case relevant in today’s global village is one of complex supply chains and impact of a single node collapsing on other nodes. A standard principle in economics (Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage) outlines that social good is maximized when entities concentrate on doing what they can do most efficiently and then trading these goods/services for other essentials of life that someone else who is most efficient at it produces. Every defense of globalization and free trade stems from this principle. Yet application of this principle results in abstracting out the real sources of important elements of modern life from not only individual consumers but also entire societies. Humans, as the recent financial meltdown suggests, are not very good at identifying the risks in such abstracted environments. Hence the ecological damage in China is not just a problem for Chinese. Due to linkages seen and unseen, it is a problem for the entire planet. In that aspect, the planet Earth is as remote as is Tikopia in South Pacific.

Collapse is a book defining a problem and not necessarily providing a solution. Diamond argues that any solution might be driven from the top or emerge from the bottom. Yet all instances of bottom-up approaches are for very small societies and implying that a top-down dictatorial approach like in modern communist China or medieval Japan remains the only feasible solution for large societies and nations. This implication is important and one needs to rigorously analyze either through historical examples or logical means if the alternate is not feasible. In an otherwise excellent and influential book, this remains the only sore point.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – Michael Chabon

In the immemorial style of young men under pressure, they decided to lie down for a time and waste time.

Michael Chabon’s tour de force on the surface deals with a surfeit of themes – from the history of comics, and the mechanics of magic to the pain of separation, the anger of dashed hopes, and the angst of an unfulfilled life: but, it is not this variety that makes The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay standout. Instead, it is Chabon’s ability to bind these variegated themes, each material enough for a separate work, to single leitmotif that defines this work.

Escape in it’s many forms is often a word with negative connotations; often implying the act of running away lacking the courage or will to do something not considering that without getting away it is also impossible to step into. Creation, whether of a new life or a work of art is thus an act of escape and a positive one at that. It is also universal; most individuals would want to escape from something – dreary jobs, housing loans, nagging spouses: this yearning thus is an emotion as basic as greed, love and jealousy. Yet regardless of its context,  with it’s lingering negativity Escape carries a certain shame to it. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay remains the only work I have read to this day that tries to do justice to the various facets of this emotion and its associated rubble.

The book starts with Joe Kavalier, a refugee from Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia, an errant magician and an artist of not inconsiderable talents turning up to share a bed with Sam Clay, his cousin, a gifted storyteller and with the quintessential teenage dream of quick success and quicker money. The Escapist, the story of a crime fighting escape artist, written by Sam and inked by Joe becomes their vehicle to the American dream. Yet neither is happy. For Joe has a burning desire to avenge the horrors that have befallen his family and Sam yearns for literary recognition and a lifestyle he cannot have. The Escapist then becomes mostly Joe’s and occasionally Sam’s  means of escaping from this real world. And in this quest for escape, they change the world of comics, and when everything seems perfectly set throw it all away.

Chabon does not try to introduce unnecessary complexity through non-linear narrative structures or characters that need belie belief. Chabon relies on the plot inflections, changing emotional state of characters and extensive use of metaphors at many levels to keep the readers hooked and keep them guessing; in fact there is something positively Dickensian about the way he writes. For example, for ninety odd percent of the book, I felt the Clay in the title was a redundancy. The book was about Joe Kavalier; Sam Clay was just his sidekick. Yet the denouement makes it clear that all along Joe’s actions and thoughts were a metaphor for Sam’s emotions.

The only minor complaint I have is that occasionally the book rambles on without really advancing the story and given the focus on plot it can become a distraction. Yet Chabon’s canvass is so large and his strokes so sure that the few errant touches are never felt.

The Mask of Dimitrios – Eric Ambler

I wonder if you are interested in real murderers, Mr. Latimer

Spy fiction is a notoriously difficult genre to nail down. It lies in the grey expanse between detective fiction (Sherlock Holmes & friends) and chase thrillers(Jason Bourne & friends); easier to define by not mapping out the traits but by laying down emblematic works as markers. With John Le Carre and Graham Greene, Eric Ambler forms a troika that authored a bulk of these markers.

The Mask of Dimitrios has Charles Latimer, ex-academic and detective story writer, in Istanbul recuperating. From Colonel Haki, a competent police oficer and equally incompetent writer, he hears about the death of Dimitrios Makropoulos. Colonel Haki’s story has gaping holes, and cheese also is mostly guesswork. To Mr. Latimer, looking for his next story, Dimitrios is irresistibly alluring. As layer upon layer of this mystery is peeled, what started as a temporary diversion snowballs into a matter of life and death. Our protagonist’s travels take him right across Europe, from Istanbul to Paris. There are chance meetings on trains and unwanted ransacking of  hotel rooms. There are spies and ex-spies, journalists and vamps. Yet, all of these stereotypes does not make The Mask of Dimitrios any different from the standard spy fare.

It is the surety of narrative that really sets The Mask of Dimitrios apart. The narrative focus is not on discovery or escape (though both elements are there) but entirely on unravelling the mystery, straightening out a tangle of facts into a sequence of events. Ambler’s assured prose  never rushes the reader, but nor does he slow them enough to put the book down and think; every new page clears the mist a little but just enough. Ambler also takes any romance out of spying. In clear and concise language, he describes spying as mostly finding the right person to schmooze, wringing information out of him and getting it out. There are no ideologies, no permanent good sides. It is a life in shadows; the successful spy (or the one who lives) is never in spotlight.

The Mask of Dimitrios combines the apparent opposites; pulp fiction written elegantly, a thriller never out of control. Most importantly, it is a rare spy novel that is also good literature.

Avatar – James Cameron

You are not in Kansas anymore. You are on Pandora, ladies and gentleman.

James Cameron is probably the greatest exponent of pushing limits of technology on screen. Each of his landmark movies, The Terminator, Aliens, Terminator 2, Titanic, has wowed audiences with what can be achieved on screen. And he does not fail with Avatar. For probably the first time an entire planet is brought alive in all it’s glory; the enormity of creatures, the breathtaking colors, the gracefulness of beings and the interaction of species in Pandora all entrance the viewer. These images turn Pandora into a living actor, not just a beautiful setting for the film. And all of this in 3D – though personally that did not wow me as much.

The plot itself, like all Cameron movies, is pretty basic. Humanity reaches out beyond stars to seek means for it’s survival and in Pandora finds the natural resource that solves the energy crisis. The indegenous population, Na’vi, living in harmony with nature for ages do not acquiesce to human’s request for access and hence they are to be destroyed if we are to survive. But there is still some good within humans and using Avatars, projections of human minds into Na’vi bodies, the fight is taken to the raiders. With its emphasis on connectedness of the ecosystem and the need for stability Avatar brings to screen probably the biggest issue of our times. The attempted colonization and desruction of Pandora in a quest for natural energy sources is an allegory to probably the greatest criminal act of recent times, and for some the greatest undocumented genocide in history.

While plot is not Cameron’s forte; a narrative structure almost entirely focussed on two individuals – the hunter and the hunted is (think again of Terminator, Terminator 2, Aliens & Titanic). The inflection point, where the roles reverse, and the buildup to it is what brings us to the edge of our seats and keeps our eyes glued. In Avatar, this manic focus is lost and therein lies the film’s greatest failure. Cameron flits between highlighting the tensions between individuals (a form he excels in), societies (The Matrix) and even idealogies (The Lives of Others). Each approach requires different cinematic handling and in trying to balance all of these the narrative focus of the film is lost.

The second aspect where Avatar fails is world-building. In Titanic, the ship had character – the hubris of the invulnerable, the innocent playfullness of the young and the tragic courage of the doomed. In Avatar, Cameron makes Pandora an actor but cannot get a good performance out of it. The world does not cry out when gunships bring down the home tree of the Na’vi nor does it participate in when love blooms. It is unnaturally inert and grotesquely static. This malignant inertness can be traced back to the human and Na’vi characters; so stereotypical and one-sided that they fail to excite and engage the viewer to any degree.

Stunning graphics and grand ideas do not make a great movie. A tight narrative structure, an engaging world and vibrant characters do. Avatar if executed properly could have been #25 in IMDB’s all time greatest movies list, as it is now, but in my opinion is nowhere close to greatness.

SuperFreakonomics – Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner

People respond to incentives, although not necessarily in ways that are predictable or manifest

The incentives for Messrs Levitt and Dubner for writing this sequel to Freakonomics are pretty obvious; they had hit gold with their first book and had to cash on before the spotlight shifted somewhere else. There was however one small problem. Freakonomics distilled ten years of original economic research by Levitt into a book. Between then and now, it is a little ridiculous to expect that he would have a similar mountain of research to present. The solution the authors came up with, is in itself an excellent study in incentives. They shifted their economic guns, discussing climate change and terrorism in the book rather than mundane issues of sumo wrestlers and school teachers cheating. The former topics can sell just on hype; to sell the later you actually need to good content.

Superfreakonomics is probably everything that Freakonomics is not. Freakonomics aimed to show that methods of economic analysis were applicable in real life; not really to solve problems but more to gain better understanding of them. Superfreakonomics is all about solving problems, how setting up the right incentives is the right (and only?) way to get us to the right solution. Freakonomics presented hypothesis that normally would fall in the category of there-is-no-way-to-quantitatively-prove-this, before presenting an approach to prove or disprove them. Superfreakonomics does not present hypothesis that need to be proved, it presents black box solutions to issues. The readers of Freakonomics understood the complexity of identifying incentives and assigning causality in real life scenarios. Superfreakonomics often ends up caricaturing complex problems as cases of misaligned incentives.

Superfreakonomics has its moments – the case of  women empowerment in rural India being influenced most by cable TV or the discussion on the economics of prostitution are interesting reads. But even for these, the subject is not presented in all it’s analytic glory. (Hence the links to the original papers)

If Freakonomics was Levitt’s book with Dubner streamlining the content, Superfreakonomics is Dubner’s book with Levitt giving an economic view – sometimes unwarranted and occasionally too simplistic.

The Demolished Man – Alfred Bester

In the endless universe there has been nothing new, nothing different.

Alfred Bester’s classic The Demolished Man is a rarity in science fiction; a work that marries the staples of this genre – esoteric new worlds or an unrecognizable current one, novel ideas and the futuristic society built on them – with a brilliant and thrilling narrative, gripping and suspenseful in equal measure. The Demolished Man is a police procedural novel set in New York of the 24th century, a world populated by telepaths and controlled by private enterprises but one where private thought is a luxury. There are no murder mysteries in this world, for all murders are prevented. It is in this world that Ben Reich, business magnate supreme, decides to murder his chief rival and get away with it. For the price of not getting away is not death, it is Demolition – the slow erasure of the entire psyche while the subject retains full consciousness experiencing in tragic multi-color his entire life dissolving away.

The central concept in The Demolished Man one man’s struggle against a system. Bester’s narrative lends an epic grandeur about this confrontation that keeps the reader hooked. And in the truest pulp fiction legacy, the fates of both sides swing to the extremes on the turn of the page. Bester has to an extent also resisted the lure of assigning ethical labels to either party just to keep bias out of this showdown.

But where Bester really succeeds is in characterizing the system, in this case the society of telepaths, the Esper Guild; striking the optimum balance of giving the guild a human face while still keep enough of it mysterious to pique the reader’s interest. While Powell, the sleuth-in-chief and telepath supreme presents a case for guild’s altruistic and social well-being motives, others characters present the guild greedy, atavistic and frighteningly incestuous. While Powell and others are important characters in the narrative, they all contribute in building up the picture of the guild living breathing organism.

The character of Ben Reich is fleshed out to demonstrate aptly the enormous potential of human will and ingenuity. At every single instance, Ben’s disadvantage in not being a telepath is highlighted as is his often astoundingly original solutions in overcoming those. Yet again, the duality in Ben’s character is highlighted – Powell comments that a side of him is utterly charming and another that is worse than plague. Ben is not an idealist; he is a little too selfish by all standards and very much human.

This was Bester’s debut novel, and here he tackled many themes that are revisited again in his other classic work The Stars My Destination. While the later book is arguably a grander conception, this one is way better on execution. Opinions and philosophies do not get in the way of storytelling and the best (in terms of both the plot and the ideas) is kept for the last.

Babel-17 – Samuel R. Delany

But for ‘house’ you have to end up describing ‘… an enclosure that creates a temperature discrepancy with the outside environment of so many degrees, capable of keeping comfortable a creature with a uniform body temperature of ninety-eight-point-six…’

A SF story, in words of Robert A. Heinlein, is one with “… conditions … [that] in some respect, [are] different from here-and-now … [but] an essential part of the story. The problem itself—the “plot”—must be a human problem … created by, or indispensably affected by, the new conditions … [and] it must not be at variance with observed facts …”.

The world of Babel-17 with the prevalence of inter-galactic travel, presence of incorporeal entities with human functions, and ability of humans to alter their bodies into grotesque forms that exist today, if at all, in the imaginations of some make it a entirely different world from ours. That a journey, ostentatiously taken to solve a critical problem, turns into a exploration of self and one’s relationship with the world is a genuinely human problem. Yet, nothing connects this journey of fears and wishes, and of understanding and acceptance, to the world that is created. And it is in creating this connection – using language, that is Samuel R. Delany’s greatest achievement in this novel.

Language, in Babel-17, is not used just a tool, to explore and uncover hidden recesses of the human mind; it is its main theme. In particular, Delany grapples with the role of language in human cognition and expression. In short, are we limited in our understanding of things and concepts because of our language? Or is there a transform from any one language to another, albeit in a convoluted way. Technically, linguists call this problem the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The plot relies on this hypothesis being true and Babel-17 starts off with a discussion of how a language differs from a code, implicitly implying that this hypothesis holds true. Yet, when Delany creates the definition of a house in a language that has temperature as the cognitive base, he moves away from the hard version of this hypothesis – something that has been proven to be false. This softening of position to create consistence with known scientific facts while ensuring that enough remains to lend credence to the plot is Delany’s most difficult endeavour.

And yet, the over-concentration on language results in an underdeveloped world. Delany flies through this new world, scarcely pausing to reflect, observe and describe. As a result, there is a strong dissonance between the two created worlds – the once inside the protagonists head, where language rules and the physical one outside of space travel and ghosts. Far too often the external world feels like an infringement on the first one rather than a natural extension. Also, the mental journey overshadows the physical journey, making the narrative extremely jarring.

Babel-17 is not a great novel. And yet, it failures are because of faults and impatience in execution, and not because of the smallness of ideas or being conservative in conception.